City Week

Chris Rush's exhibit, Where Do You Come From?, is on display in the lobby at Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St. Saturday, Jan. 31 through Friday, Feb. 6. An artist reception takes place from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 31 at 311 E. Congress St. Call 622-8848 for more information.

TAKE A PEEP (UM, PEEK)

Postmodern Productions is new in town, but it's comprised of well-tuned local promoters of traditional and world music performers. Now, they're getting their hands messy with another kind of extrovert.

Dr. Carol Queen is not your run-of-the-mill doctor. She's a sexologist and pleasure activist--yes, there is such a specialty--and she's coming to town for a reading, an excerpt of her cabaret show and a workshop.

Peep Show is Queen's solo spoken-word performance in which the alumna of the peeps takes a look inside the locked doors of the private pleasure booths of San Francisco's Lusty Lady Theatre. If you missed her at last year's Sex Workers' Art Show Tour at the Rialto, let her tease you this time around. Her shows take place at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Jan. 30 and 31, at the Cabaret Theatre at the Temple of Music and Art (330 S. Scott Ave.). Tickets cost $18 in advance at Antigone Books or online. They'll cost you $20 at the door. Students with ID and seniors 60 or older get in for $10 (at the door only). Friday's performance begins with a fund-raising meet-and-greet reception at 8 p.m.

If you want a different kind of entrée to Queen's work, stop by for a reading by the author from two of her many books--essays from Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture and stories from Leather Daddy and the Femme. She revs up at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29, at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.). The reading is free.

Finally, for all those closet exhibitionists out there, you're invited to participate in a workshop called Exhibitionism for the Shy. Queen leads the session beginning at 2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 31, at Cabaret Theatre at the Temple of Music and Art. It's for girls only (sorry, boys). For $20 in advance or $25 at the door, figure out how to feel more comfortable and be more bold, sexually speaking.

LIGHTNING STRIKES AUTHORS

Don't wait until you win the lottery. Or until you get struck by lightning. Dislodge that manuscript jammed inside your sock drawer and get thee to a publisher.

Where to begin? Here's a chance to find out the many convoluted steps you need to go from kernel of a thought to book tour.

Publishers, literary agents, editors and marketing experts converge on Tucson for the 32nd Wrangling With Writing, a national conference held annually. Locally, it's sponsored by the Society of Southwestern Authors.

You can expect revelations of closely guarded secrets about how to get your book, short story, screenplay or article published. There are 30 workshops to choose from covering all the writing genres, plus one-on-one meetings with agents and editors who will solve all your individual problems.

If you just want to peruse the book exhibit, it's free. You can saddle up and talk with authors, get them to autograph their books or just enjoy the deep discounts each day from 4:15 to 9:30 p.m. The conference workshops begin at 7:30 a.m. both days and continue until 4:15 p.m.

Registration fees are $225 for SSA members and $300 for nonmembers. Call or visit online to sign up.

BUBBLY ART

Afloat opens this week with activities to launch a new collaboration between Tucson's Museum of Contemporary Art and the local children's museum. Artist Heidi Hesse has created the interactive installation where a tray of water sits atop a podium while its image is projected on a facing wall. The constant motion of the water is pitched onto the vertical surface and is manipulated by any spectator, large or small, who walks by.

Kids learn about science--how'd that pool of sloshy liquid turn into an image on the wall?--and also conceptual art. From 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, and from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Sunday, bubble art activities explore the qualities of light and water and physical form. Kids get to discover the science behind reflection and refraction. Left open to viewer participation, spectators create ripples in both the art and their discovery of new ideas.

Hesse is a 2003 recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship and her exhibit, Exporting Liberty, opens at MOCA on Feb. 7.

The children's activities are free with museum admission, which costs $3.50 for kids 2 to 16, $4.50 for seniors and $5.50 for adults. The show continues until May 2. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

FORENSIC ART

In the mid-'70s, two young California artists, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, became intrigued by the aesthetic potential found in photographs originally made as records. Armed with only a letter from the National Endowment for the Arts, they began rifling through the file cabinets of police departments, municipal agencies, industry headquarters and testing facilities.

These guys are the true paper pushers.

In 1977, the pair exhibited 79 of these pictures at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and put out a book that same year titled, Evidence. Pictures that once served a functional purpose were stripped of their explanatory captions and institutional contexts and introduced to the world as expressive artifacts. That same year, the CCP opened at the University of Arizona and acquired the entire set of photos taken by the two artists. They sent it on an international tour.

The experiment was a fascinating, if not puzzling, one. And more than a little provocative, says CCP's director Douglas Nickel. "Sultan and Mandel assumed a complicated position within contemporary debates about the aesthetics of the documentary photograph."

It's a debate that continues more than 25 years later.

Nickel has brought the collection of Sultan's and Mandel's work back to the museum in a show simply called Evidence Revisited. The book is being reprinted this year as well. Here's a chance to re-examine this groundbreaking foray into the history of photography. Make up your own mind about the relevance of found photographs in the context of the museum world of the 21st century.

Museum hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday and noon to 5 p.m. on weekends. Admission is always free.